In response to Shmuel Rosner’s post on James Baker’s belief that both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush “waited too long” to tackle the Arab-Israeli issue, Emanuele Ottolenghi listed everything Clinton facilitated from 1993 through 2000, including: the ceremony on the White House lawn, the Cairo Agreement, the Washington Declaration, the Jordan-Israel peace agreement, the Oslo-II agreement, the Wye Accord, the Camp David Summit, and the Clinton Parameters.

The seven-year Clinton “peace process” ended with the Palestinians rejecting the Camp David offer of a state, starting a new terror war, and declining the last best offer in the Clinton Parameters. On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush inherited a war already in its fourth month and an Israeli electorate that within two weeks dismissed Ehud Barak in a landslide election. Dennis Ross retired to write an 800-page book to explain how the process did not work out as planned.

Far from ignoring the Arab-Israeli issue, Bush did the following: (1) became in 2002 the first U.S. president to endorse a Palestinian state as a matter of official policy; (2) translated the policy in 2003 into a Road Map approved by the UN, the EU, Russia, the Palestinian Authority and Israel; (3) negotiated with Israel in 2004 on the Gaza Disengagement Deal (and got West Bank settlements dismantled to demonstrate it would not stop with Gaza); (4) supported a Palestinian election in 2005 to endorse a new leader pledged to dismantling terrorist groups; (5) permitted all parties to participate in the 2006 elections to give Palestinians a choice between the “peace partner” party and the premier terrorist group; (6) scuttled the first two phases of the Road Map in 2007, in order to keep the process going, even after the Palestinians elected their premier terrorist group; (7) convened a worldwide conference in Annapolis in 2007 to begin a year-long period of final status negotiations; and (8) had his Secretary of State make umpteen trips in 2006-2008 to push the negotiations.

And Bush ended up exactly where Clinton did: with another seven-year “process” culminating in a Palestinian refusal to accept a contiguous state, on substantially all of the West Bank and Gaza, unless Israel accepted the “right of return” and a re-divided Jerusalem along the 1967 line. During the entire 14-year process, not a single terrorist organization was dismantled. The problem was most certainly not U.S. presidents who “waited too long.”